3xRaptor Advice

Gophinx · 16 Jun 2007 at 13:51

Hi, I currently have 3 raptors in a RAID 0 configuration using a SIL3114 chip on my Asus A8N-SLI Motherboard and using HD Tach I only get an average read of 94.8MB/s and a burst of 116.6 MB/s. I was thinking that this may be down to the fact that I'm using a poor quality on board chip, so I was thinking of getting a new PCI-E(4x) RAID controller. Just wanted to know if that was a good idea and if so which one would utilize the raptors best.

Cheers

rpstewart · 16 Jun 2007 at 14:23

It may be that the SI chip on that board is attached to the PCI bus which will limit the bandwidth available. I'd try using the NForce RAID ports first before going for an add-in card.

ChrisD. · 16 Jun 2007 at 15:05

I've got 2 Raptors in Raid 0 on that board and I'm using the nForce controller and I see about 115 average MB/s. That SI controller is naff mate.

Gophinx · 16 Jun 2007 at 15:48

I should have mentioned that I've got 2 standalone HDD running off the NV controller atm and I need to have access to the data on them and I think that the SIL controller doesn't support single drives

Phemo · 16 Jun 2007 at 16:04

Buy a PCI SATA Controller then put your other two drives on that so that your NV SATA ports are free. Obviously the PCI card isn't going to be lightening fast either, but it's the speed of your RAID array that you'd be most concerned about.

fobose · 16 Jun 2007 at 16:43

That will only be able to transfer upto 133mb/s so its not really worth the money imo.

Elric · 16 Jun 2007 at 17:26

Gophinx said:
I should have mentioned that I've got 2 standalone HDD running off the NV controller atm and I need to have access to the data on them and I think that the SIL controller doesn't support single drives

Yes it should. You may need to go into the bios or in the Sil control screen at startup to change the disk type.

Phemo · 16 Jun 2007 at 18:33

fobose said:
That will only be able to transfer upto 133mb/s so its not really worth the money imo.

If they're single drives then they're not going to be anywhere near that speed anyway.

I used to have the same board and I also couldn't get the Silicon Image controller on it to work with single drives. All other Silicon Image controllers I've used have been fine, but not that one

juno_first · 17 Jun 2007 at 15:16

I have A8N SLI premium too & been using dual RAID 0 for ages in sillican controller but when I got another 2 identical drives the sillican went bozy & gave a load of corrupt file readings.

Using onboard nforce controller now & its running sweet with 4 hitachi 80gb drives:
min 104
max 163
av 145
seek 12.9
burst 180

ChrisD. · 17 Jun 2007 at 21:21

I've got three drives on the board, two raptors and on caviar, raptors on ports 1 & 2 and the caviar on port 3. I have the BIOS set to RAID mode, and in the SATA option I've selected 3 ports to on and the other to off. Works fine for me.

Gophinx · 20 Jun 2007 at 17:48

Cheers for the all the replies, I've change my array over to the NV controller and I've got much better results
Burst : 218.1MB/s
Average: 159.6MB/s
I was wondering if anyone had any recommendation for a pci controller for the other drives in my system